Levendbarende hagedis op een Gronings eiland

The common lizard in Blauwestad In the northeast of the Netherlands, a landscape transformation project Blauwestad, designed to give this poor and underperforming region an economic boost, has led to the creation of a 800-hectare lake. The project concerns an area in the middle of the 'Island of Winschoten', a former peninsula that push moraines, formed during the ice age, protected from flooding by the nearby sea. For hundreds of years, this area was a part of Bourtangerveen, a huge moorland that stretched from the norteast of the Netherlands to northwestern Germany. From the Middle Ages onwards, people harvested the moorland peat, thereby gradually changing the area into agricultural land. Nowadays the only remnants of the moorland are on an island left in the middle of the newly formed lake, three strips of peat together having a surface of 0.4 hectares. Along with some broadleaf woodland and grassland, they form the 25-hectare nature reserve Meerland. A small population of the Common Lizard (Zootoca vivipara) occurs in the grassland around the peat strips, probably a remnant of a large population that once lived on Bourtangerveen. Now one of the most northern of the Netherlands, this literally isolated population has an uncertain future.